Vacation

We’re going on a trip to be at the opening for Tom’s next show. (His work is also on view here. One of his pieces is also in this month’s Harper’s Magazine.) We haven’t hit the old stomping grounds of Minneapolis since we moved from there a bit over two years ago, strange, but true. It should be fun. I am, however, faced with the typical farmgirl dilemma:

how can I leave my babies?

By babies I don’t mean the one I gave birth to, as she of course will be with us. Nor do I mean those baby chicks, the big chickens, the sheep, the kitties or the hyperneurotic superbonded dog. I mean, of course, my seedlings!!!

I think there is absolutely NO good time to go away from the farm, except maybe the icy throes of mid-January when it’s too early to seed-start, too late to garden.

Your seedlings are adorable – I love your pictures. Mine reside in trays under grow lights at the moment. Next week, I have to leave mine for 5 days and I am getting worried. They are like little babes …

Welcome!

Glad you came to visit!
Got something to say? Email me at fastweedpuller at gmail dot com.

Wisdom from the sage

Wendell Berry:

"We have lived our lives by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. We have been wrong. We must change our lives so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption, that what is good for the world will be good for us. And that requires that we make the effort to know the world and learn what is good for it."
--from an essay in "The Long-Legged House"

"The word agriculture, after all, does not mean "agriscience," much less "agribusiness." It means "cultivation of land." And cultivation is at the root of the sense both of culture and of cult. The ideas of tillage and worship are thus joined in culture. And these words all come from an Indo-European root meaning both "to revolve" and "to dwell." To live, to survive on the earth, to care for the soil, and to worship, all are bound at the root to the idea of a cycle. It is only by understanding the cultural complexity and largeness of the concept of agriculture that we can see the threatening diminishments implied by the term "agribusiness."

"Odd as I am sure it will appear to some, I can think of no better form of personal involvement in the cure of the environment than that of gardening. A person who is growing a garden, if he is growing it organically, is improving a piece of the world. He is producing something to eat, which makes him somewhat independent of the grocery business, but he is also enlarging, for himself, the meaning of food and the pleasure of eating."
--both the above are from essays in "The Art of the Commonplace: Agrarian Essays"

Search for:

Is this so hard to believe?

"An atheist is just somebody who feels about Yahweh the way any decent Christian feels about Thor, or Ba'al, or The Golden Calf. As has been said before, we are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further," Richard Dawkins, 2002.